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Comment by falsedan | Hacker News Reader

> if here in Italy you opened an activity with real or supposed insert your favourite heritage here style, no one would ever care

I bet many people would care, but they would not persistently & vocally voice their discomfort for fear of retribution/confrontation.

> how should we Italians feel about being always portrayed as "pizza, mafia, gobbledygook mamma mia"?

In popular media? Complain to the broadcaster/studio/publisher, support organisations like the Italic Institute of America to do this on your behalf.

Why should you do that? Because you think that the stereotypes unfairly prejudice Italians who may be denied opportunities in those countries.

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I think your comment perfectly proves GP's point.

> I bet many people would care, but they would not persistently & vocally voice their discomfort for fear of retribution/confrontation.

How about: because they have better things to do with their time? The perception of oppression of any group you can name is mostly just manufactured.

> Because you think that the stereotypes unfairly prejudice Italians who may be denied opportunities in those countries.

If this is actually happening, then such a country has a much deeper problem of people being dumb enough to deny opportunities out of petty prejudices. This is not a normal state.

I couldn't voice it any better, thank you.

> The perception of oppression of any group you can name is mostly just manufactured.

> This is not a normal state.

I think you underestimate how systemically racist most countries are.

Look, if I were to believe I was being denied opportunities in the US because of the portrayal Olive Garden (and the like) was doing about Italy and Italian, I think I wouldn't deserve the job in first place.

Culture is important, you must know yours and others, but I really believe people on certain echo chamber aren't getting their priorities straight.

Or, if you let me, they have life SO good, they have run out of good things to complain about.

But I know I may sound to harsh about this. It's the perception we get from overseas.

> Or, if you let me, they have life SO good, they have run out of good things to complain about.

This is my perception of things. Or, as I sometimes put it in person, "people haven't experienced a war in a long time so they're going batshit with priorities now".

Also: it's not that we run out of issues to solve, it's that most of the actually important ones - like energy security, climate change, stabilizing agriculture and healthcare, developing - are hard and don't lend themselves into us-vs-them thinking. Even figuring out how one can contribute to that is difficult, and it's easier to find some proxy irrelevant non-issue to bitch about instead. And media only amplifies that.

EDIT:

Also, and this is probably a very controversial opinion: I think that the ongoing talk about a lot of those proxy-issues is strongly, actively harmful. The number one focus of the world right now should be stabilizing what we have. The technological civilization is very fragile, and at the point in which if it collapses, it won't rebuild itself for millennias, because all the easily obtainable high-density energy sources have been used up. And with the death of technological civilization, all the dreams of freedom, equality, long and healthy life, will die too.

Humour: I also like to think this is "Farenheit 451" becoming a little too real.

Serious: we are definitely not ready.

There was an episode on The Soprano (no mafia/pizza pun intended :-D) where Tony tried to visit a prostitute he was "in love" with.

She was not there, but her roommate, also a prostitute, from Russia (or an alike country I don't remember), with one fake leg, was.

As he was complaining how miserable he was, she starts lecturing him of how Americans people have stopped having real issues, or living in life threatening situations, and so they invents themselves new ones which looks ridiculous for people coming from less developed countries.

For me it's exactly that.

And don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly aware that there are people in deep trouble in America, homeless or not wealthy enough to treat nasty diseases right.

And this is a first world problem you can also witness in some European countries too. Or cities, not necessarily while countries.

It's like we, humans, cannot bare to go through life being just happy.

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